bobingabout wrote: ↑Wed Dec 05, 2018 9:26 am
In theory you can have as many masks as you want, as long as they all have their own tint. Those that take tint from special sources (Like the locomotive being able to change it's colour with a slider, or the player's colour, etc) can only have one.
So, yeah, it would work as a mask layer.
Obviously only one for user defined masks. But the rest is good to hear, i will make separate masked surfaces for you to play with.
bobingabout wrote: ↑Wed Dec 05, 2018 9:26 am
Don't worry about doing any special contrasting or lighting effects, just do whatever you did for pipes, and that should be fine. The key point is that they would be made of 4 or 5 different materials, iron, steel, invar or brass, titanium and Nitinol.
Cool beans. The only one that's going to be difficult to make unique is nitinol as it looks like chrome/silver/steel combined in that order. But so do many different metals. Iron, steel, titanium and brass you already have examples of in the pipes i made. Never posted a titanium image so you have to DL the mod.
bobingabout wrote: ↑Wed Dec 05, 2018 9:26 am
Something else I was thinking... instead of having the pipe connections rendered on, would it be possible to instead have a separate pipe connection overlay, similar to what the assembling machine does? Look up assembler2pipepictures().
Yeah i noticed the assembling machine has that special connection. I will have to try it but (without checking references) i'm not sure storage tanks have nor inherit the proper fields for that? It's only an assembler thing isn't it?
Of course there's workarounds for everything but i can simply supply the graphics and you can do the LUA digging. Adding/removing pipes is as simple as duplicating and hiding them from render.
bobingabout wrote: ↑Wed Dec 05, 2018 9:26 am
if you have pipes on all sides like that, it would make rotation pointless, and could also make it awkward to try and route pipes around it (with the 3x3, it only connects if you have a pipe next to a corner, which can be a good thing sometimes if you're trying to route pipes), but it does support rotation (options are none (1), 2(which is done with a flag) and 4). Looking at other entity's pipe connection definitions (pumpjack) it is possible for each rotation to specify the location of the pipe connection, rather than it just rotating with the entity. Unfortunately the number of connections must remain the same and it will probably fuck up if you try to rotate blueprints, but it should be possible to have rotations such as... 2 on the left and 2 on the right... 2 on the top and 2 on the bottom... and then 1 on each side similar to what the existing tank does.
That's the point with my storage tanks, there's no rotations. Hence no need to produce extra sprites. My tanks are a solution to the problem of splitting and merging fluids, they are not a mass storage solution. Though they could be.
So far for mass storage i've always used Angels pressure tanks with 350 k capacity. Why use anything else? Apart from them being an awkward 5x5 tiles and only having one connection per side.
I hear you on the pipe routing around them though. I don't build that compact myself but i can see how a min/maxer would find them annoying when they connect to everything.
Pipes on the other hand are really annoying in factorio, i wish i could just disable connections per side of a pipe so i can run different fluids in parallel without having to leave a one tile gap.
Of course that's solvable by making 1x1 storage tanks that are of different shapes. But in essence, the problem is pipes, not storage tanks.
Either way, making different variants graphically is easy. Unless the whole tanks shape follows the piping.
bobingabout wrote: ↑Wed Dec 05, 2018 9:26 am
unrelated
Capacity of a 2x2 tank? simple maths of 25000/9(tiles) *4(tiles) = 11111. though the 3x3 tank is round, and the 4x4 tank is "square". instead lets do 25000/pi *2 =15915. It's nor perfectly square though, so I'd round down to 15000.
So personally, I'd recomend a capacity somewhere between 12000 and 15000 for a 2x2 fluid storage tank... which actually kind of makes a 3x3 a downgrade.
The 1x1 tank i have carries 3000 liters because if you connect four mk4 pumps to one, you need at least
2000 (500/t * 4) EDIT: 1500 (500/t * 3) to be able to feed them, yes there's 1500 more in there but... BUFFER... And yes, as i said in your thread, i need that kind of throughput sometimes because machines only have one port per fluid type.
In reality, it's .35 x .35 x 1 cylinder so it's capacity should be 380 liters. But there's a reason for 3000 liters and it stays that way. The same reason i've made your copper and brass (the two pipes i use currently) carry 1000 liters each. Otherwise there's not enough throughput to feed speed moduled and beaconed machines going full tilt.
The 2x2 tank is made up of two shapes. Bottom is 1.7 x 2.5 x 0.7, it's oblong because sqrt(2) madness in factorio.
That would be 2975 liters on the bottom.
The top part is 0.7 high so that would add another ~990 liters. A total of 3965 liters.
And if we disregard "oblongness" it would be 1.7 x 1.7 x 0.7 = ~3000 liters.
The vanilla 3x3 tank is about 2.8 x 2.8 x 2.5 so it should have 19,600 liters.
However, i take a different approach to all this. Gameplay over realism.
If i were to re-balance the whole game and all yours and angels recipes then yes, i would care a lot more about just how much storage there is in each tank per tile.
But in this case, i care more about how useful it is. a 2x2 tank at 20 k may have a higher "per tile" value than the 3x3 storage tank BUT it's still smaller in capacity. If i am looking for storage, i go for the biggest capacity PER ENTITY, not per tile. When i go for utility all i really care about is that the tank is big enough to split liquids equally and provide a bit of a buffer.
I have contemplated making my own realistic approach tech mod. Where liters count. Less flow, higher complexity. Because let's face it... 200 liters/t in vanilla pumps is 12,000 liters per second passing through a 0.4 m radius, 2 m long cylinder. That's a volume of 1000 liters traveling 24 meters/s or 86 km/h! And that liquid is stopping and starting in 1/60th of a second.
Ever heard of water hammer? Crash a car into a wall at 86 km/h and you will know how the machine that just stopped such a flow feels.
Recipes should work with less liquid or higher production times. But this is factorio.
If i made a realism mod it would start small with something like 10 liters of fluid for one item. And ending up on 1 million liters of fluid for 500,000 items (bulk processing) and of course there would be HUGE fluid storages to accompany these kinds of recipes. Sunk into the ground because making tall entities in factorio is BAAAAD because orthographic projection, or rather non rotating camera.
